a guide for brands willing to trust the distrust

Trust is a coveted thing.

We’ve seen brands spend a lot of dollars trying to figure out how to earn trust in a crowded marketplace. And there’s no shortage of “shortcuts” to trust in the marketplace:   

• Hot celebrities

• Cute animals

• Cute kids

• Make it funny

• Make it sexy

• Product led growth

• Copy that sells

• Marketing automation

• CONSISTENCY ON LINKEDIN!

• Tell a story (suckers, err, customers love stories)

And then, after all that marketing is done, we get statistics like these:

• 62% of customers don’t trust advertising.

• 66% of consumers believe brand transparency is important

• 73% of consumers would pay more for a brand that is transparent

• 77% of consumers buy from brands that share the same values as them

• 88% of consumers factor brand authenticity when making a buying decision

• 94% of consumers are loyal to brands they feel are fully transparent

We can just hear some heartbroken CEOs now…

“Sixty-two percent of customers don’t trust our advertising? But we spent so much money and energy on it!”

The frustration, the fear, the need…all those things are real and understandable. We get it – we’re not just a brand agency, we’re a brand too. Who had bandwidth to deal with a cynical public in this economy?

Nobody. Your well-funded competitors are going to outspend you anyway. Companies are like suitors – both the villains and the heroes start with the same question: “How Can Get THEM to Trust ME?”

Turns out starting with trust is the problem.

We begin with distrust.

trust the distrust

So we know that customers are distrustful of brands at a record level. And we also know why. For years now, anyone who’s conducted a part of their life online (work, social media, shopping, email, music, and so on) has been sold to death. How much “to death?”

 

In the 1990s, the average person going online saw somewhere around 2500 ads per day. 2500 of anything is a lot, unless you’re talking about grains of rice. Today, that number has grown to nearly 10,000 ads a day.

 

Now for the real nail in the coffin: estimates are that only about a quarter of those ads are actually relevant to the person looking at them.

 

That’s right – only 2,500 ads out of 10,000 ads are relevant. That means on average, consumers are looking at around 7,500 ads that have literally nothing to do with them a day.

 

To put that into sharp relief, let’s say we made you playlist of 10,000 songs and put it on shuffle.

7500 of those songs are in genres of music you don’t even like. 7500 opera arias for every country fan. 7500 pop ballads for every metal head.

2500 of those songs are in a genre you would listen to, some songs you love, some songs you hate, lots of songs in between. Some played over and over and over again. We’re looking at you, Coldplay.

 

Even the best songs on the playlist are a blur of the mind because we’ve trained you to tune it out. And here’s what’s worse the HOPE that something in there applies to you actually makes your cynicism worse because you’re constantly disappointed.

 

When consumers distrust marketing or even whole industries, we TRUST them because in that distrust is a misplaced hope. In that cynicism is the ember of a once-existing belief that some brand out there could help, could make a difference.

If only brands would give a damn.

 

We begin with distrust because it not only tells us a lot of important information about our customers, it helps us empathize with them. We get it. They’re tired. We can trust their distrust to point out all the places where they’ve been burned, exhausted, hounded, and driven to deep suspicion and apathy.

 

To earn the trust of a customer, you have to begin with their distrust. Understand it. And shape your brand and message in complete and utter empathy with it.

find your place, find your buyer

The consumer is trained for apathy. Honed by cynicism and increasingly impervious to the noise that is marketing. As we saw above, it’s no stretch to say that the enemy of marketing is marketing.

 

People prefer to ignore brands. Marketers and agencies use examples of the few brands which break this rule as a way validate aggressive marketing tactics. Until a brand is rightly positioned it will always overspend on marketing and attention-seeking techniques.

 

Positioning today is not what it was even 10 years ago. Positioning today is about finding the link between their distrust and your unique ability. Something in your company’s natural strengths is perfectly primed to alleviate the distrust consumers have in your market. Just like Uber capitalized on the distrust in cabs and Airbnb capitalized on our shared side-eye to hotel bedspread and Tesla made electric cars cool.

They each saw a fundamental breakdown in trust between a category’s buyers and its middling vendors. They saw the threat of commodity and competing on price as a signpost to find a new place, a new way to meet the customer. And they used their embedded strengths to do it.

To follow their footsteps, you’ve got to abandon the fantasy of being all things to all people, and instead realize that you are uniquely built for a particular distrust in the marketplace. There’s cynicism out there that only you have the products, services, and will power to solve.

 

One of our current clients, Washington Avenue Advisors, made a revolutionary leap forward just this past week when they took their rebrand online, positioning themselves as the go-to financial planning firm for entrepreneurs willing to build toward an exit strategy. Because they have a capital fund themselves and have invested in many businesses, they are uniquely suited to address the cynicism that exit-minded entrepreneurs have about financial advisors. We can’t tell you how rare it is, especially in the land of wealth management, to find one that actually says, “These business leaders are the community we love, and we’re throwing all our expertise and resources to making them better.”

 

WAA could have remained generic – hoping a customer still had some attention left over to hear them. But instead, they rewrote their brand as a love letter to one specific community. There isn’t a doubt in any entrepreneur’s mind, when they step into a WAA office, that they’re the right buyer in the right place.

Every customer or client you want is hanging on to some status-quo competitor out of fear that the devil they know is better than the devil they don’t. Your success is not contingent on being the loudest devil in hell’s cacophonic choir. Your success is in listening to the fear and doubt that is holding onto those old relationships by a thread, and then build a love letter to ones holding on.

in brands we trust

We believe that people, deep down, don’t want to be suspicious. Who would choose anxiety over peace of mind if they could? Yet, here we stand, in the late stages of a digital revolution, where the remaining spoils go to the very large, the very aggressive, and the shameless.

 

For the rest of us, there is the wake of cynicism and misplaced trust. If brands have been so integral in creating this problem, how on earth could they be the solution?

Not to be too frilly, but all heartbreaks are mended the same way. Even the most superficial ones. They are mended by care, attention, intention, and goodwill from someone who is similar but different from the one that hurt them.

 

We are clear-headed enough to believe that brands used digital marketing to break the consumer, to break the fundamental trust of the commercial exchange. But we are wild enough to believe that few brands could be exact thing to heal that which has been breached. And that commerce itself would mend stronger in the broken places.

Buying and selling continues. The essential decision of a shopper in the marketplace of potential brands is more prevalent than it’s ever been. And the stakes are higher.

 

The middle market was once a slipstream of opportunity from entrepreneur to enterprise. Today it is a minefield populated by institutions and systems that collect your money and then use it to compete against you. (Here’s looking at you, Amazon, Facebook, and Google.)

 

Does it seem harder than it used to be? That’s because it is. Do marketers and agencies like ours seem less reliable, less capable, less inspired than you want them to be?

 

You’re not crazy. If you want to keep fighting the same fight with the same tactics, then you’ve got lots of places to choose from. We were built to solve for your cynicism. CultureCraft was built by people who hate agencies. Because we, like you, want it to be different.

 

Trusting the distrust is a foundational piece of our Give-a-Damn framework. Nick (CultureCraft founder) is going to be doing a literal 25-minute invitation-only sprint through how to apply the above concepts.

If you want to join in and take your next step to building trust in the age of cynicism, we’d love for you to join. Just hit “reply” and ask to be added to the Trust Sprint.

 

Let’s go build that future together. Ready?